The Redbooks are generally book length PDF's (or actual books if you prefer that) that contain lots of general information about the topic at hand and snippets of examples written at the IBM Senior Engineer level. The walk throughs tend to pore in great detail over basic things (like half a chapter on how the webserver communicates with the application server. I'll sum it up for you: HTTP on port 9080, was that so hard?) and breezes over important complex things like "how to implement security" in a factually inaccurate paragraph. Highly irritating.

Redpapers are basically research papers written by interns and sometimes higher level researchers. Generally very interesting and completely esoteric theory.

Yes, there are exceptions to both these areas, but they are exceptions.

Another big plus is that IBM tends to change the names of minor products about every 6-8 weeks and refuses to acknowledge anywhere that the prior name ever existed. So your documentation says to install SecureWay only there is no such product. Only after realizing that the search function on the IBM site is somewhat less useful than wings on a penguin and go to google groups are you able to find that it is actually now called IBM Directory Server . Or Services, depending on the day of the week. And it reportedly now no longer blows up on install either. Hooray.